Saturday, December 08, 2007

Bad week?

New blog

A fine young man called Kasper Kulak, whom some of you will already know, has just started blogging over here. He intends his new blog to be "a place where people are invited to discuss Ayn Rand's philosophy in regards to Art, Ethics, Reality, Epistemology and Politics." It is his hope, he says, that some interesting discussions will occur. Help make it so, and head over there and wish him well (and do mention that missing apostrophe to him...).

Cold water on hot temperatures

Here's some Science Reading for delegates sunning themselves on Bali's beaches between sessions at the IPCC's latest talk-fest that will have them spluttering into their daquiris.

One of the IPCC's earliest blunders was the promotion of the so called "hockey stick" temperature graph -- it was the most dominant graph in the first three IPCC reports and in all their scare stories -- a graph that ramped up late-twentieth century surface temperatures and obliterated the medieval warm period, producing a hockey stick-shaped graph for the temperatures of the last millennia, with a large, scary uptick at our end of the line saying to productive human beings "It's All Your Fault!".

Steve Mcintyre and Ross McKitrick between them put the hockey stick out to pasture, demonstrating that poor methodology and reliance on unreliable tree ring data rendered the IPCC's favourite graph meaningless: they showed that any figures run through the algorithm producing that hockey stick shape would have produced that hockey stick shape. Any figures at all, from the incidence of cancer in rats to Britney Spears' fluctuating panty size.

The IPCC quietly dropped the hockey stick (and here's how the figures look now). But the IPCC now has a new star in their apocalyptic firmament: a new graph -- the very first graph in the IPCC's latest official pre-Bali "synthesis" report on climate science (a report summarised here) -- a graph that as Terence Corcoran describes in the National Post "purports to show temperatures soaring over the last 25 years. The recent jump, the IPCC says, is 'very likely"due to man-made carbon emissions."

But research by Ross McKitrick and Patrick Michaels suggests this baby should also be put to bed: their research suggests the land-based temperature record on which the IPCC's new baby is based is irretrievably contaminated. Summarises McKitrick,

In a new article just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research -- Atmospheres, a co-author and I have concluded that the manipulations for the steep post-1980 period are inadequate, and the [IPCC's] graph is an exaggeration. Along the way, I have also found that the United Nations agency promoting the global temperature graph has made false claims about the quality of its data...

Our new paper presents a new, larger data set with a more complete set of socioeconomic indicators. We showed that the spatial pattern of warming trends is so tightly correlated with indicators of economic activity that the probability they are unrelated is less than one in 14 trillion. We applied a string of statistical tests to show that the correlation is not a fluke or the result of biased or inconsistent statistical modelling. We showed that the contamination patterns are largest in regions experiencing real economic growth. And we showed that the contamination patterns account for about half the surface warming measured over land since 1980.

In other words, we have confirmed, on new and stronger grounds, that the IPCC's global surface-temperature data is exaggerated, with a large warming bias. Claims about the amount of surface warming since 1980, and its attribution to anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions, should be reassessed using uncontaminated data. And governments that rely on the IPCC for advice should begin asking why it was allowed to suppress earlier evidence of this problem.

The ball appears to be back in the court of the IPCC -- and it looks like they might have been aced.

Friday, December 07, 2007

Beer O'Clock: White Cliffs Mountain Lager

A friend for whom I'd done a wee favour dropped me off four bottle of White Cliffs organic Mountain Lager earlier in the week. By crikey, the favour must have been appreciated because this is a cracking drop.

It comes out of the same Taranaki brewery who've produced the international award winning Mike's Mild Ale for twenty years (reviewed here by Stu). First brewed in 2004, the Mountain Lager uses Nelson hops and organic malts from Germany, "traditional lager yeast" and "pure New Zealand water" from "the North West." Not sure where that is, but that's what White Cliffs' website boasts.

It looks and tastes like a local version of everyone's German favourite, Schofferhofer Hefeweizen, with the slightly citrus biscuity notes so evident in the German beer, and an even fluffier head and the sort of subtle roasty flavours for which Mike's Mild has become so popular, but perhaps just a shade drier and a touch thinner in taste. It's not quite there, but it's still a delicious afternoon drink , and an ideal session beer.

If Telecom grew a pair ...

Telecom could do with someone in their top seat with the balls of the man in the top seat of Telstra Australia. While Telecom meekly comply with the diktats of Broadcasting Obergruppenfuehrer Herr von Cunliffe (tugging their forelocks in obeisance to He Who Runs the Show as they scramble to dismember themselves as commanded and make their network available to all comers) Telstra's Sol Trujillo (left) openly derides Kevin Rudd's election-promised "partnership" to build an across-Australian broadband network, calling it a "kumbaya, holding hands" theory. It might have been an election promise, but looks like no- one stopped to ask the company supposedly being partnered. Says Trujillo: "We are only going to participate in the things that we own and control."

Mr Trujillo, firmly backed yesterday by chairman Donald McGauchie, said Telstra was happy to invest $4 billion or more of its own money rather than the taxpayers' - but only on its terms and pricing.

Perhaps it's appropriate that Trujillo was brought up in the country in which the word 'cojones' was invented.

Determining who can buy an election

Anyone at Waiouru contemplating the theft of national treasures need only have looked to the leaders of the land to find others whose behaviour offered both justification and vindication.

For it surely must be more than coincidence that Parliament is passing a bill which will steal our right to free speech in the very same week that other thieves have been roundly condemned for stealing the medals awarded to those who once defended it. There's an awful symmetry here, an apposite meeting of motives that is too obvious and poignant to ignore...

What our politicians are doing this week is not preventing people from buying an election. They're actually determining who can buy it. And they've very sensibly decided it should be them. While deftly wrapping a gag of red tape around everyone else's tongue, their bill specifically exempts parliamentarians from its provisions.

When Hopkins gets to the point, he can be awfully direct. "What our politicians are doing this week is not preventing people from buying an election. They're actually determining who can buy it." Print that out and hang it from the nearest flag pole.

This morning we learn that the government's foremost economist, on whose shoulders responsibility for what Hayek calls the country's nationalised money rests, has similar aspirations. For some reason, he thinks he is able to repeal the laws of supply and demand that have increased world prices of food and oil and the domestic prices of energy and housing and labour, and somehow fight these price rises by adding another one of his own: the ongoing cost of nationalised money.

It's moronic.

The law of supply and demand is not to be flouted in that way, and the danger of trying to flout price signals as Bollard wants markets to do is that price signals are telling us something we need to know -- and two things we need to know with all those prices at present is that on the one hand there are good reasons to enjoy the prosperity coming from increasing and solid demand causing higher commodity prices; and on the other hand it's government meddling of various sorts that have been raising them (not least government meddling in the name of 'the environment' -- see here, here, here and here for example). But Bollard just doesn't want to know, either about the good reasons or the bad.

Instead, to dampen down wage pressures to keep up with a genuine rising cost of living, he's keeping the cost of housing high by an artificial imposition (and at a time when housing is already one of the highest costs of living ). He's making things worse, not better.

And in the name of an illusory price stability, which in itself leads to instability, he's keeping the cost of borrowing high on all producers -- and this at a time when, as ANZ economist Cameron Bagrie argues, what's driving genuine inflationary pressure is in part NZ's low rate of productivity.

Note that among the chief reasons for NZ's low rate of productivity are the high cost of local capital, government meddling adding to the compliance costs and uncertainties for producers, and a high exchange rate making things tough for exporters. Bollard intends to make all these pressures worse, denying (in the name of an illusory price stability) a chance at genuine prosperity. It's worse than moronic, it's deluded.

The reason that Bollard and other mainstream economists are willing to continue nailing our economy to this deluded cross of price stability is that they look at inflation precisely backwards.

They see price rises that are driven by good market reasons -- for the most part at the moment it's the market reacting to the meddling of governments and growing prosperity in India and China-- and they cry " Inflation!" and let slip the dogs of interest rate doom. Yet at the same time they watch the Reserve Bank, under Bollard's direction, inflating the money supply by around fifteen percent year on year, and they pretend that this currency inflation is part of the inflation fight!

And just look who's doing the applauding? Morons who see the fight the same way he does. Other mainstream economists who begin by ignoring inflation as a monetary phenomenon and end up endorsing the Reserve Bank's flight from reality -- Cameron Bagrie for example who endorses it with the unintentionally ironic observation that "common sense needs to prevail." An odd way to characterise a complete flight from common sense, you would think.

Bagrie, who's no doubt representative of his breed, compounds the stupidity by calling for a "growth sacrifice" now [audio] to avoid worse down the track. "We now have a real inflation problem," says Bagrie. "That means there is going to be a sacrifice to get the inflation genie back in the bottle." If we could only get this deluded idea about price stability back in the bottle and silence the Reserve Bank's thundering printing presses, we might well avoid the need for any sacrifice at all.

Even if you start from Bollard's premises, his worries about tax cuts seem odd. If the government has the money, it either saves it or spends it. If it spends the money, it tends to hire people. Hiring people also requires buying office space to put them in. What have been the two big components of inflation? Wages and non-traded goods (housing/buildings). When government spends money, it spends it in the areas most likely to push prices up.

If it provides a tax cut, people either save the money or spend it. If individuals spend money, a fair bit of that goes to buying imported goods which have zero inflationary effect. Price inflation in the tradeables sector has been pretty much zilch for the last year: we're a small player in the grand scheme of things, and our importing more stuff has no effect on prices.I just don't see tax cuts winding up being highly inflationary.

IPCC in Bali: Garbage Out, Garbage In

Fifteen thousand or so people have flown to Bali to talk up global warming, blowing out about 110,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide to fly to the talk-fest and be air-conditioned for two weeks. This gives delegates a combined carbon footprint equivalent to a wet October in Pittsburg. (And as the chap who did that carbon calculation says, "One wonders how many people would have gone if the conference had been held in a wet October in Pittsburgh.”)

That's a carbon footprint of 110,000 tonnes for a conference seeking to impose greater restrictions on the carbon footprints of everyone else -- the credo seems to be 'virtue for thee, but not for me' -- and all while conference-goers seek to maintain their cushy sinecures courtesy of the taxpayer by scaring the bejeesus out of those who make up their pay packets.

On this basis alone it's hard to take anything emerging from Bali with any degree of seriousness. Too much hypocrisy and self-contradiction to even begin to take seriously the garbage that will come out of it.

Going into Bali, the reading de rigeur for every delegate is the UN/IPCC's "Synthesis Report," (you might call this document the 'Garbage In' part of the whole equation) which was released in November to "synthesise" the four "Working Group" reports produced over the course of the year -- or at least the summary thereof was released, because once again the politicised summary is released before the science that is supposedly summarised therein. Go figure.

The summary itself is a political document that downplays assessments of uncertainty from the scientific reports written by the main body of the IPCC, which themselves are far more subjective than the IPCC would have one believe.

Equally important, both the IPCC's summaries and main reports omit much contrary evidence. In several cases, the Synthesis Report disagrees with the reports on which it is based, and it fails to take account of cautionary publications in the scientific literature that were available early enough to have been incorporated into the Synthesis Report.

Climate change and climate policy are key issues for future human welfare, but that concern should translate into sober analysis and actions that are likely to do more good than harm. The people of the world should not let themselves be steamrolled by a report that reflects the IPCC's interest in promoting climate change fears, rather than in conveying the weight of the scientific evidence.

** On a related note, and as an example of runaway scaremongering of the sort to expect over the next week or so as a result of the Garbage Out part of the Bali equation, you might also be interested in Schwartz's analysis of a climate change editorial in yesterday's Sacramento Bee. According to the Bee's editorial writers, the IPCC's reports suggest rising seas are likely to submerge California's cities. Unfortunately, the Bee left out a few pesky details--including contrary evidence within the IPCC reports themselves...

Hayden Planetarium - James Polshek

The Hayden Planetarium, designed by architects Trowbridge & Livingston, opened in 1935 in midtown Manhattan.UPDATE: Oops. The planetarium shown here is the new one, not the one opened in 1935. It was the original that was designed by Trowbridge & Livingston. The stunning building in the photos was designed by James Polshek, and apparently "conceived in his mind" in 1993.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Roger Douglas, 70 not out

The seventieth birthday of Dodger Rugless prompted many people to send him their regards, and to point out that the economic golden weather we've been enjoying in recent years is in many ways due to the reforms instituted by both Rugless and Ruth Richardson (reforms which have been left largely untouched by the Clark-Cullen Government). Cactus points out, for one, that "Without his reforms people like myself would be working overseas to send money back to our poor New Zealand families, Samoa, Philippines and Island style."

True enough -- but it's not quite enough. Reflecting on Douglas achievements from 1984-88, Douglas' former colleague Michael Bassett called the Lange/Douglas reforms "a revolution of sorts," but even if a new generation of activists has apparently been sold the line that a revolution was what was had back then, it's time to be reminded that it wasn't one at all.

Recall for instance that when Lange called for his famous 'cup of tea and a lie down,' Douglas had just announced both a Flat Tax (which everyone now remembers) but also an accompanying welfare scheme called the 'Guaranteed Minimum Family Income,' which everyone now would like to forget -- paricularly Douglas supporters. It would have done for New Zealanders what Helen's 'Working for Familes' has only just done - made most New Zealanders into welfare moochers. If this was a revolution, it's no wonder it was one that today's Labour ministers were able to buy into.

Lindsay Perigo, who as the country's foremost interviewer at the time was front and centre for that whole era, rejects absolutely any idea that it was a "revolution," even "of sorts." Talking to an American audience ten years ago about the myth of revolution, Perigo explained how the various reforms have ultimately failed — and describes the philosophical revolution it will take for liberty to succeed":

When I first spoke on a similar topic to an [American Objectivist] gathering in 1995, I said that New Zealand was a nation reformed by Hayekians, run by pragmatists & populated by socialists. The editor of 'Liberty' magazine, Bill Bradford, quoted that line in his March 1997 'Liberty' article, 'Revolution in a Small Country,' a glowing account of the nature, scope & future of New Zealand's economic reforms...

In a fit of ridiculous hyperbole, Mr Bradford implicitly likened New Zealand's revolution to the Industrial Revolution itself; he called it the "one occasion in the twentieth century when the Leviathan State has been successfully challenged," and described its architect, Sir Roger Douglas, as "the most effective libertarian politician of this century" who "slew the statist dragon."

Well, I hate to be a party-pooper, but Bill Bradford was wrong on all counts. The Industrial Revolution analogy is self-evidently fatuous; the Leviathan State in New Zealand is as invasive and pervasive as ever — indeed, more so; and Sir Roger Douglas, effective politician though he undoubtedly was, was and is most assuredly no libertarian. What the New Zealand experience affords, is — an intriguing object lesson in how far one can go, in a democracy, in making economic changes without a proper philosophy, without a popular mandate, and therefore, without accompanying attitudinal changes.

What's wrong with "big money"?

I hear all the time that "minorities" should be protected. "Minorities" need the protection of law. Minorities need to have their voices heard. This is widely considered today to be a moral principle of a very high order.

Yet as the spin around the Electoral Finance Bill demonstrates, this defence of minority "rights" is applied by this government and its allies in a most discriminatory manner: it is applied only to racial minorities.

There is one minority however who this government thinks should sit still while the law removes their voice and taxes them to hell; who should remain silent their right to speak freely is muzzled; who should keep quiet even while this government goes through their pockets to pay for views which they oppose.

The one minority whom this government has chosen not to protect but instead to do over, are people who have earned their own money. The rich. The wealthy. This "ownership class" it seems is the one minority that deserves not protection, but out and out political persecution.

Why?

Why shouldn't people be entitled to advertise their own views with their own money, just as long as all are free to do the same thing? Why should people be required to stay silent while they're forced to fund views they oppose? What's actually wrong with "big money" and those who've earned it? Why should the speech of producers be rationed, while they're forced to fund the speech of the unproductive?

There is nothing more cancerous or corrosive than to vilify the most productive members of society.

There was a time last century when those who didn't own property were excluded from voting. one could be forgiven for thinking that those fomenting the present feeding freezy would like to bring about that same situation in reverse.

Perhaps you think the word "persecution" too harsh? Consider this*:

If a small group of men were always regarded as guilty, in any clash with any other group, regardless of the issues or circumstances involved, would you call it persecution? If this group were always made to pay for the sins, errors, or failures of any other group, would you call that persecution? If this group had to live under a silent reign of terror, under special laws, from which all other people were immune, laws which the accused could not grasp or define in advance and which the accuser could interpret in any way he pleased -- would you call that persecution? If this group were penalized, not for its faults, but for its virtues, not for its incompetence, but for its ability, not for its failures, but for its achievements, and the greater the achievement, the greater the penalty -- would you call that persecution?

If your answer is ''yes'' -- then ask yourself what sort of monstrous injustice you are condoning, supporting, or perpetuating. That group is the [world's] businessmen. . . .

Before handing over the reins of his ministry to Maryan Street, he prepared a bill along those lines which she is now peddling with even less understanding of the issues that cause housing unaffordability than Carter had. It deals with the serious problems that are causing rising house prices by making things worse for those building houses; by insisting that developers who are already hamstrung by rising costs simply be forced to build cheaper houses, and on land often worth far more than the houses they'll be forced to build.

King Canute could have done no better.

The bill purports to foster a method by which more affordable housing can be built: it does so by making life impossible for the builders and developers who will deliver them.

On top of all the regulatory hurdles already in place for those building new homes, this bill adds one more: the decree that developers, whose margins are increasingly slim, will have to add so-called 'affordable housing' to their developments -- low-cost housing on high-cost land; land made more expensive by the meddling of planners -- leaving any profits to be made from these homes to the purchasers who subsequently onsell them (which may happen relatively quickly). As I said when this nonsense was first proposed:

This will not result in an increase in affordable housing: it will result instead in developers' margins becoming even slimmer, and their ranks as a consequence becoming even fewer. Fewer developers with ever-slimmer margins will do nothing to decrease galloping demand, but it will help to even further decrease supply (and to demonstrate once again that the laws of economics are not be be repealed even by the decrees of a minister).

Carter has learned nothing from Canute, or from history -- or from the Law of Unintended Consequences. The history of government controls is like the story of the Emperor's New Clothes in reverse: New controls are added all the time in order to fix the problems caused by previous controls, but no one is listening to the little boy who is saying, "Why not just take off the controls altogether, and then you won't need to make up new ones." Why not just get governments both central and local the hell out of the way altogether?

Ever-increasing and ever-higher interest rates designed to squelch booming housing prices; the mortgage levy; the de facto cartelisation of NZ's 'big five' banks; now a decree that more affordable homes be built ... all measures desperately calculated to fix the symptoms of exploding housing costs while ignoring the regulatory causes.

As long as the regulatory causes of galloping unaffordability are ignored, unaffordability will continue to increase, and the working lives of builders, designers and developers made more onerous. But don't just believe me. The same scheme has been a disaster in all the countries in which it's been introduced, from Ireland to Britain to Canada to the US. The US figures (described by Owen McShane) are representative:

Over a ten year period, in US markets where the mandates had been applied, supply reduced, on average, by ten percent and house prices increased, on average, by twenty percent. This does nothing to make housing more affordable and indeed only makes things worse. Also, the restraints on resale actually made those "lucky" enough to acquire a "below market" house ended up much worse off than the rest of the population.

McShane's comments are backed up by research presented at a recent conference in San Jose. Economists Tom Means, Edward Stringham, and Edward Lopez presented Below Market Housing Mandates as Takings: Measuring their Impact a draft chapter from a book on "takings." The three economists have updated their 2004 findings and present more rigorous and detailed statistical analysis. "Their conclusions," says McShane, "should kill off any thoughts of forcing developers to provide a percentage of below market priced housing in return for development consents." These three University economists conclude:

Over a ten-year period, cities that impose a below-market housing mandate on average end up with 10 percent fewer homes and 20 percent higher prices. These results are highly significant. The assertion by the Court in "Home Builders Association v. Napa" that “the ordinance will necessarily increase the supply of affordable housing” is simply untrue.

We have been warned, and before any government forces New Zealand home builders and land developers to provide houses at below market prices someone will need to demonstrate why these findings regarding supply and price will not apply in the housing markets of New Zealand.

That will be a difficult task because both papers are based on the simplest and most firmly established economic principles linking supply, price and demand."

We know that Labour cabinet ministers have no interest in repealing law. I wonder then why they think they are able to repeal the laws of supply and demand and price?

Cue Card Libertarianism: Political Spectrum

Because of the abysmally low capacity for intellectual abstraction among philosophically illiterate politicians, journalists and political science graduates, however, it is seemingly impossible to shake off the label “right wing” even when irrefutable evidence is offered that the label is wrong. Therefore, it becomes necessary to point out periodically that “libertarians are neither left nor right wing.”

Leaving aside its historical origins, the spectrum as commonly understood nowadays is a one-dimensional line that places communism on the extreme left (out to the west), fascism on the extreme right (out to the east), with gradations of democratic versions of each in between -- something whose usefulness is close to zero, except for those with minds as one-dimensional as the left-right spectrum itself.

Libertarians maintain that all philosophies on this one-dimensional spectrum sanction coercion; that the differences are merely of degree not of principle; that it matters not whether coercion is initiated by a majority or by a dictator – it is still coercion, to which we are opposed in whatever guise it is practised. In short, the traditional one-dimensional spectrum fails because it excludes from discussion the full spectrum of political freedom. (And this is perhaps one reason for the spectrum's continued popularity.)

To lump libertarians in with the extreme right – with fascists, xenophobes, religious bigots etc. – is just as ignorant as it would be to call libertarians communists.

Another division of ideologies sometimes suggested is to place the total state on the left – communism and fascism – and the total absence of the state – anarchy, on the right, with gradations of statism in between. Thus: Communism/fascism democratic socialism/welfare state/mixed economy capitalism/limited constitutional government/individual freedom anarchy. But even this division is artificial, since anarchy also permits coercion without legal restraint, and must inevitably lead to some institutionalised form of it.

If you really must simplify everything in this fashion, then a more meaningful arrangement is to make the traditional spectrum two-dimensional rather then one-dimensional by placing another line across the existing left-right one that goes north-south, heading down to authoritarianism at the bottom pole and up to freedom, sunshine and libertarianism at the top pole. At the four points of the compass then you would have Lenin, Mussolini and Winston Peters to the south; left-liberals like Gandhi, Ralph Nader and Nandor Tanczos to the west; and conservatives such as Margaret Thatcher, Rush Limbaugh and Ian Wishart to the east. Libertarians of course join Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and P.J. O'Rourke at the top of the world.

However and all in all, to paraphrase W.C. Fields, libertarians would rather be in Philadelphia. In 1776. And since the view of the state-citizen relationship expressed in the US Declaration of Independence doesn’t seem to have a comfortable place anywhere on the conventional Left-Right spectrum, it behoves us to leave those on it to quibble over who is to coerce whom, to what extent and why, while we get on with the business of promoting freedom – accepting with reluctance that in the meantime we shall undoubtedly have to put up with ignoramuses calling us “right wing.”

'Gobhai Mountain Lodge' - Nari Gandhi

This was architect Nari Gandhi's first project after returning to India in 1964, a jewel-like exercise in geometry, siting and simplicity. Featured in this month's 'Friends of Kebyar' magazine, editor Michael Hawker explains, the design responds to specific conditions of the site.

Roof beams are set at 30-degrees while roof panels are perpendicular to the walls, setting up dynamic rhythm inside, while the two geometries themselves develop from the nature of the two distant views, the Rajmachi hilltop Fort and the Valvan Lake below, which the verandahs overlook. The roof on the east face is "pressed down" to redirect the air flow of the prevailing southwest winds.

The Republican Party is in trouble. The candidates are all mixed economy mediocrities, with the possible exception of Ron Paul, who is out in left field. None had specific, courageous answers about what Thompson called the "entitlement tsunami" headed our way. By all indications, the presidency of any Republican except Paul will be an extension of Bush's policies. [A Paul presidency would be both different and worse. --GvH] Some made general statements about cutting spending, but only Paul gave specifics. The rest are too terrified of offending the legions of Americans who now suck off the federal teat...

The only two candidates who sounded like they had integrity were the libertarian antiwar candidate and the Christian big government candidate. The rest are the kind of middle-of-the-road hacks you would expect among Republican politicians. The candidates are in a welfare state bind: the only way to look principled is to risk angering some pressure groups full of voters; but being controversial is the quickest way to marginalization. It is impossible in today's America to be honest and principled about getting the government out of our lives and remain a serious candidate. I don't think I've ever been so depressed after a debate.

Notes van Horn, Given Myrhaf's previous analysis of what makes Hillary Clinton a weak candidate, the idea of a "Huckabee vibe" -- or other similar superficialities that supposedly inspire voters -- is frightening.

And a note to myself on that same depressing state: It is equally impossible in today's New Zealand to be honest and principled about getting the government out of our lives and remain a serious candidate. As the politically compromised Deborah Coddington observed recently, and just a trifle hyperbolically:

On one side, the state-worshipping collectivists, with thought processes which go something like: state-owned equals good - privately owned equals bad. They apply this same argument to education, health, security, transport, television, radio, and even water for heaven's sake.

On the other side, those vehemently opposed to anything run by the state except for the protection of life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, call themselves the Libertarianz Party and look for cupboards in which to hold their annual conferences.

How did it come to this? Mainly because all his better-known rivals have defects. Mix Romney's money and managerial acumen, John McCain's honesty and military record, Fred Thompson's southern charm and Rudolph Giuliani's toughness – and you'd have an Identikit candidate to bowl over every Republican in the land. On the other hand, if you blend Romney's Mormonism, McCain's age and support of the Iraq war, Thompson's plodding indolence, and the liberal social views and messy private life of Giuliani, you'd come up with a candidate who might not win a single vote from Christian conservatives, so important a part of the Republican primary electorate.

Infinity pools

Capital Coast: Not just a die-while-you-wait health system

Following the death of a one-day old baby after her and her mother were released from Wellington hospital just six hours after giving birth, details have now been released under the Official Information Act showing that up to one in eight patients at Wellington's hospitals "is the victim of a medical accident, error or mishap," and up to twenty-three patients of Wellington's Capital Coast Health were either killed or endured serious harm through inattention, incompetence and bungling.

The information describes the standard of care at Capital Coast Health as "a shambles." An independent November audit stated that "crisis management was the normal operating environment at Wellington Hospital." And all while government spending on the government's health system has rocketed. The answer is clearly not more of our money.

The reaction to these revelations suggests the answers won't be forthcoming from the administrators and senior clinicians of Wellington's Capital Coast Health either, nor from apologists for the state's die-while-you-wait health system, all of whom seem to consider this an acceptable level of failure. A "shambles" is apparently all we should expect from state health care.

I agree with them. That is all we can expect.

CCH apologists argue that "these problems occur everywhere," and of course they do: they occur everywhere the state attempts to handle the lion's share of a country's health care.

In Britain, for example, studies suggest these serious or "sentinel" events as they're called regularly affect up to one in ten patients, and that this figure is normal for a bureaucratically driven state-run hospital system. One in ten. Think about what that means for a moment. It's a level of incompetence that is life threatening for one in every ten patients that enter the portals of a government-run hospital.

Think about that next time it's you or a loved one entering that hospital.

Frighteningly, this is a level of failure -- of failure that leads to death -- that state health apologists consider acceptable. Indeed, if the representatives of the Wellington's Health Board are to be believed the very worst part about the release of this information of incompetence, bungling,and inattention being released is that it might "discourage clinicians" being open in remedying future problems.

But there's no evidence that there's ever been any motivation to remedy future problems -- indeed, the more excuses for failure we hear, the more it's clear just how much failure has come to be accepted as normal. The apologies and excuses offer no comfort at all that any motivation even exists to rememdy the bungling that killed twenty-three people, and will go on killing up to one in ten patients who enter state care.

It's not just a die-while you wait system. These figures show there are good odds you'll die if you get there as well.

Perhaps that's why fifty-six percent of New Zealanders surveyed told the Commonwealth Fund International Health Survey that the country's creaking health system needs "fundamental change." This isn't time to sit around and make excuses. It's not time to simply change the administrators and keep the same failed system. It's time for radical action.

Husain: "Moderate muslims" must "end the madness"?

Yesterday's Herald had a piece by Ed Husain, culled from the Observer, that looks at exactly the same recent incidents around the Muslim world I canvassed yesterday -- the floggings, the hangings, the calls for execution -- and takes an almost identical position to the one I took in yesterday's post, except that Husain calls on so called "moderate Muslims" to make a stand against Islamists to "end the madness."

Last year, it was the Danish cartoons. This year it is a teddy bear. What next? And why this repeated madness? For me, it is not about the possible offence taken at perceived negative portrayals of Islamic symbols, but the repeated calls for death, lashings and stoning. The medieval, literalist mindset that fails to comprehend the inhumane nature of these brutal and barbaric acts, often carried out against the defenceless, is the crux of the matter.

And so it is. But where Husain starts well by observing the barbarity, by recognising that "The Western media are right to hold a mirror to educated Muslims by highlighting these outdated practices," by asking "the ubiquitous question ... where is the voice of the Muslim majority?" he still falls some way short. Since he still maintains that there is a moderate Islam with a "benign face" he comes up without any real solution to those Islamists who truly believe that "No one shall live who insults the prophet."

This medieval, literalist mindset is the face of Islam, and I'm certain Husain himself knows that, which leads to him simply hand wringing instead of taking a proper and potentially more productive stand.

"More than ever," he says, "Western Muslims need to stop viewing the world through bipolarised lenses and assert our Western belonging." True, but. The "but" is that Islam itself is built on a barbaric heritage: it was a creed born by force, filled with bloodshed and spread by the sword. It's true that it subsequently enjoyed a golden age of wealthy secularism, but the realisation that the secularism was in no way compatible with the Koran led to a swift and decisive rejection (by Islamic philosophers such as al-Ghazali) of the this-worldly focus that had preserved Aristotle and Euclid and Archimedes and built the Alhambra in Spain -- the rejection resulted in a thousand-year plunge into the Dark Ages. Islam is still there, and until it can find a philosopher to reverse al-Ghazali's disastrous rejection of reason and this world, so it will remain.

It will take more than a simple assertion of "Western belonging" to reverse that, more than just the intention to "build a home together" -- it will take the realisation levelled at Husain by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and which he notes as a challenge to himself: That the very essence of Islam is barbaric, and must be rejected; that to make of Islam a religion of peace will entail excising the very essence of Islam, and rejecting what the Koran maintains is God's law; that thinking must be liberated from its role in the Muslim world as the handmaiden of theology, and focussed instead on this life, and this world.

The extent of what is needed can be judged by the nature of al-Ghazali's rejection (on behalf of Islam) of thought itself, and his embrace of the Koran as the Muslim's sole source of knowledge. "If it's already in the Koran we don't need it," al-Ghazali proclaimed. "And if it's not in the Koran, we don't want it."

It would of course need a new Enlightenment, and leave behind it a religion that was nothing but empty ritual and saintly noise -- something like modern Anglicanism, but with better hymns. That's hard. Harder than Husain seems to realise, or even recognise that this is what his call of necessity entails.

Husain had the courage to put a career as an Islamic fundamentalist behind him. He still has some way to travel -- and so too do his mainstream moderate Muslims. Let us hope he and those few others like him have the courage to continue speaking their mind.

UPDATE: Wafa Sultan explains the barbarism that inspired her to begin her fight Islam, here at YouTube[hat tip Sandi]. "Islam has never been misunderstood," she says. It is "a brainwashing machine... [it is] exactly what the prophet did and said."

Hillmer's use of natural materials helped define the Bay Region Style in the years after World War II...Hillmer also earned a reputation as a perfectionist, and by 1960 Architectural Forum summarized his career as "20 years of practice (that) have produced few buildings but very expressive ones." All told, Hillmer produced fewer than 10 finished homes -- but they have had an inordinate influence because of their purity and beauty, even spirituality.

"My approach to architecture was as an art," he says. "The approach of most other architects is as a business. I never really thought about how much money I was getting."

Note his ingenious use of light and and of raw, natural materials, even down to the delightful wooden basins ...

Something in the wind on the Electoral Finance Bill?

Remember how the National Party opposed Sue Bradford's Anti-Smacking Bill, and how National Party MPs stood up on the steps of Parliament and told protestors against the Bill how vehemently they opposed it? Do you remember what happened just a week later, when John Key did a deal and those same MPs crossed the floor to vote for the Bradford/Key Anti-Smacking Compromise?

We had demonstrated to us as plainly as its possible to have something demonstrated that these people had no spine and are not to be trusted. I'm talking about National Socialist sell-outs like Bob Clarkson and Chester Borrows and Shane Ardern and Tau Henare and Maurice Wimpianson and Judith Bloody Collins who stood there on the steps of Parliament and told an audience passionately opposed to the Bill that they were too ... and who then showed with their pathetic acquiescence that their assurances and their promises are one-hundred percent worthless. As they are. As is their spineless, deal-making leader.

UPDATE 1: The Clark Government has just tabled a whopping 150 amendments to the Electoral Finance Bill -- an unprecedented sign of contempt for what is fundamental constitutional law! Says David Farrar:

Do you remember Helen claiming the Bill was great now it is out of select committee? So great, it needs 150 amendments. Could you imagine the outcry in most countries if suddenly one has 150 amendments to the constitution, a couple of hours before they get voted on? Mickey Mouse is too generous a term for it. I’ll blog the substance of some of the changes as I work through them.

UPDATE 2: David's started this morning looking at the deluge of amendments and what they might mean. Here's his first post.

Don't save rail

There's talk that after buying back the rail track some years back for the princely sum of one dollar -- yes Virginia, excluding salvage value that was all the country's extensive network of steel tracks were worth -- the Government might now also buy back the whole operation from rail operator Toll Holdings. Herald story here.

The threat to buy comes about through negotiations over the "track access fee" -- that's the toll Toll pays to use the Government's track -- and in what looks like a backroom bid to have the whole operation renationalised, the Government has been playing hardball. They want to charge more; Toll wants its subsidy increased.

Whether the operation is nationalised or not, the taxpayer loses either way. We're already paying to subsidise a failing operation, renationalising it won't stop it losing money. Renationalising rail will make the socialists in cabinet feel good, but it won't change for a second the transparent fact that, as Liberty Scott points out, "it's a dud investment. Something socialists are good at finding."

There's a point to make here that should by now be obvious to all but the most braindead socialist, but which even supporters of privatisation seem to have overlooked. The argument used when the NZ Rail dinosaur was hocked off was that private business would run rail more efficiently. This was given as the justification at the time for all the morally necessary privatisations done in the late eighties and early nineties, but in truth efficiency was only ever one part of the economic story; only one of the strings in the privatisation bow.

The full economic argument included the urgent necessity to find out what these industries were really worth -- something only able to be established by private ownership in an open market. In the case of rail, the real value of the rail network was found to be abut a dollar. Without the ongoing subsidy courtesy of the taxpayer (ie., money down the drain), looks like the rail operations might be worth about the same. Hardly what you'd call "vital infrastructure" -- more an expensive, arthritic and completely futile waste of precious resources.

World chucking record

Normally here at Not PC I like to celebrate achievement; I like to praise heroes. So in the normal course of events when a bloke knocks off Shane Warne's record-breaking achievements to take the record for the number of batsmen dismissed in world cricket, a record that's unlikely to be challenged any time soon, that should be a chance to praise the world's most successful bowler -- a guy South Africa's Daryl Cullinan says, "was the only bowler I faced where you felt he could get you out every single ball."

Except he's not, is he. That is to say, he's not really a bowler. As English fans like to sing when he steps up to deliver the ball: "Throw, throw, throw the ball, gently down the seam, Murali, Murali, Murali, Murali chucks it like a dream." For the non-cricket readers, what this means is that in cricket the bowler is required to use a straight arm in his delivery of the ball, whereas what Murali does is ... something different.

Don't send stupidity to college

Very pleased to hear that Auckland University is taking what's been reported to be the unusual step of applying entrance standards to the people wishing to enter their hallowed portals to study arts, education, science, theology and first-year law. It's not exactly applying a standard of excellence to run the rule over entrants before they rock up and start filling your lecture halls, but it might at least be the beginning of a move towards one.

I'm sure many people were surprised to hear that few practical standards have been applied up to now in selecting entrants for these courses -- that "open entry" is considered the norm. I'm sure however that many people won't have been surprised to hear the bleating that has accompanied this announcement.

"We are shutting the door on the potential students and achievers of the future," said Auckland University Student Association education vice-president David Do, for example, demonstrating in a stroke why entrance criteria need to be raised to exclude those like Mr Do without even the brains they were born with: It is obviously beyond the wit of Mr Do to realise that those who fail to achieve the bare minimum necessary to enter a university are unlikely to be sort of material from which potential students and achievers of the future are made -- not at least in an academic environment -- or to notice that graduates with theology degrees are hardly likely to be setting the world on fire in any case (this is perhaps one course where entrance standards could be set so high as to exclude all entrants. But I digress.)

And John Minto illustrates PJ O'Rourke's point that earnestness is just stupidity sent to college, demonstrating in one short self-contradictory press statement that entrance standards excluding the stupid should have been applied more rigorously in Minto's day: the whole country and Minto himself would surely have been better off if the man had become a panel beater.

"The sad fact is that with lower standards and a general 'dumbing down' of academia, degrees are worth much less than they used to. Higher entrance standards will benefit all Auckland University students, by improving the reputation of the institution," Mr. Howison pointed out. "The role of the NCEA should also be mentioned. It is this assessment system which often leaves tertiary institutions and employers befuddled when attempting to assess a candidate's ability."

I look forward to this more rational admissions policy taking hold in other groves of academe throughout the country.

UPDATE: Oops. Looks like the mandarins at Auckland University are already running scared at being tarred as, gulp, "elitists"! Deputy Vice-Chancellor for the Braindead Professor Dalziel this morning rejected the suggestion that the proposal could "risk a slide to elitism" -- an unfortunate metaphor, really, since it would be the only slide in Christendom with a trajectory pointing upwards. In any case, the Braindead Vice-Chancellor confirmed that "special entry schemes" for the braindead, the retarded and those with IQs approaching those of Mr Minto's and Mr Do's already run in courses with restricted entry and "it was envisaged similar arrangements would be used."

So there you go. Standards schmandards, says Uni. If you really want standards, then perhaps panel beating school would be better.

Monday, December 03, 2007

In the dock

Quote of the Day, from Rowan Atkinson

The casual ease which some people move from finding something offensive to wishing to declare it criminal - and are then able to find factions within government to aid their ambitions - is truly depressing.

"No one lives who insults the prophet."

Like the avengers who vowed death to novelist Salman Rushdie for his affront to Islam, like those who slew Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh for his, like the mobs who ran mindless riot across Europe in protest of cartoons they deemed offensive to their prophet, now tens of thousands of Sudanese Muslims are demanding the execution by firing squad of British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who made the mistake of letting her 7-year-old charges name a teddy bear Muhammed.

Al Jazeera reports that hundreds of protesters marched through the Sudanese capital Khartoum demanding death for the British school teacher "convicted of insulting Islam," chanting "No one lives who insults the prophet." Said one of those demonstrating in support of his stinking sub-human superstition, "It is a premeditated action, and this unbeliever thinks that she can fool us? What she did requires her life to be taken."

And can't you just feel the silence from the liberal left ... it's a silence that's almost palpable.

UPDATE: Elan Journo argues that this attitude of half-arsed appeasement of evil is the very reason Pakistan is now in turmoil -- Washington blinded itself to the "creeping Talibanization of Pakistan" he says, all the while insisting that "we needed Pakistan as an ally, and that the alternatives to Gen. Musharraf's military dictatorship were far worse."

If the administration was right about that (which is doubtful), we could have had an alliance with Pakistan under only one condition--treating this supposedly lesser of two evils as, indeed, evil.

As with all such appeasement, the result is the strengthening of the enemy and an increased danger to the freer world, potentially leaving the Islamists with, as Journo points out, "a new staging area in Pakistan from which to plot attacks on us (perhaps, one day, with Pakistani nukes)."

It doesn't get much more frightening than that. Read Journo's complete piece here.

Gagging justice

The Attorney General's threat to gag Herald reports on earlier details of the man accused of murdering Emma Agnew highlights again the disturbing trend to hide what's going on in our courts, just as it was highlighted in the orders for name suppression and evidence suppression in the recent 'Urewera 16' bail hearings.

In recent years New Zealand's courts have admitted TV cameras, but at the same time have more and more frequently enforced orders suppressing information about what's going on inside those courts. We can see pictures, but we're not allowed to know who's on trial, and what the evidence against them is. Picture but no sound. We're being treated like children, and there's little justification for it.

Name suppression, evidence suppression -- these recent high profile cases in which the media have been gagged from reporting details that would help we the people ( in whose name the courts are operating) to judge for ourselves whether justice is being done have highlighted this unfortunate predilection for gagging orders.

I've argued before that "It's unfortunate that our courts seem to have forgotten the crucial principle that underpins their work: that justice must not only be done must must be seen to be done. When justice is kept under wraps, all sorts of nonsense appears in the vacuum... Why do the courts consider us so immature that we can't handle hearing the evidence for ourselves in media reports, instead of hearing only the nonsense that its absence has generated?"

The Attorney General is telling the Heraldto suppress its old stories on the man accused of murdering Emma Agnew. I hope the Herald tells the Attorney General to stand up for a change for freedom of speech and open justice.

The law around pre-trial contempt of court (and sub judice) is based on the theory that the risk of biasing judges and juries outweighs freedom of speech, including open disclosure of what is known and obtainable by insiders, or those determined to find out.

I am not aware of any balance of evidence to support [this] fear... Indeed the attempt to treat juries like computers, cleansed of any pre-knowledge, and sheltered by evidence exclusion rules from anything a judge patronisingly considers prejudicial, turns upside down the original justification for a jury of your peers.

When justice comes with gagging orders, then justice is neither being done, nor seen to be done. It's time to reconsider their popularity.

CD launch

I enjoyed a delightful evening last night at the launch of a CD of Wagner's piano music by New Zealand musical legend Terence Dennis, a chap who's accompanied every major New Zealand vocalist from Kiri Te Kanawa to Donald McIntyre to Simon O'Neill, and for whom this is his first commercial recording.

Terence played a huge role in mentoring Simon O'Neill and a whole generation of NZ singers, and Simon was on hand last night to pay tribute and then pin us to the wall with a thunderous rendition of Siegmund's 'Ein Schwert werhiess mir der Vater' from Wagner's Die Walkure, before rushing off to catch a plane to New York to take the starring role of Siegmund in the Met's new Ring Cycle. The boy is in demand at all the world's opera houses, and it's easy to hear why!

Terence's CD is playing now on my stereo, and is on sale now at Marbeck's. [NB: Marbeck's picture shows the wrong CD, but fear not, their excellent staff will ship you the right one.]

Tip Jar

In America, they tip. In NZ, we shout beer. If you like the service here at Not PC, drop a tip in the tip jar and you can do both.

Recent
Comments

Bad week?
LOL. I wonder how many offices have sledgehammers around. Store in the stationery cupboards, under the cutlery draw in the staff lunch room. Or is the boss a bit of a tease and keeps one beside the photocopier?
New blog
A fitting surname for an enemy of the collectivists.
Cold water on hot temperatures
"The ball appears to be back in the court of the IPCC -- and it looks like they might have been aced".

Don't be foolish PC. You should be smart enough to know that people who cling to dogmatic ideologies such as biocentrism do not care about facts; at the very best they treat them as EQUALS to opinions. No matter how much proof goes against global warming, the IPCC and the goverment parties that support it shell remain strong.
Ah well, who remembers the millions of people sacrificed at the altar of communist and socialist dogma? Who remembers the millions sacrificed at the altar of religious dogma? Who even thinks about the lost talent, opportunity and productive output that was lost to the depredations of such nonsense or the requried to defend against it?

Now we have this latest outbreak of irrational cult action. One hopes this is cured swiftly and represents the last time it occurs.

LGM
Beer O'Clock: White Cliffs Mountain Lager
Not PC's pics on line...
If Telecom grew a pair ...
I am delighted to here those comments from the Chief Executive of Telsta.

Always been a bit suspicious of the chap due to him being..ummmm...'foreign'..but..gosh! this is excellent!

PM Rudd seems hell bent on following Whitlam into the valley of death...and demanding a company spend billions of dollars on an arguably unnecessary project, is one way to get there!
Opps...I see a spelling error.

That was meant to be 'hear'..*BLUSHES*
Surely this is the approach that Telecom tried and they got firmly smacked with barely a whimper from shareholders and other interests who should have been very concerned at the precedent.

The shareholders assn was notably quiet as they seem more interested in publicity events at AGMs than the theft of property rights.

Insidershareholders assn

Agree, Bruce Sheppard and his stunners from the shareholders assn, should have raised their concerns and protested hard against the government's interference in Telecom's properties.
Isn't Trujillo an American? I never picked you for an anti-American, Elijah...Opps...I see a spelling error.

That's what made you blush? How about the comment judging Trujillo based on his foreign pedigree? It says a lot more than your spelling does.
"Trujillo sounds like a fuzzy-wuzzy, Cap'n Mainwaring!"

This creature will start posting in earnest now that PC's influence is on the rise with the MSM. He will post this sort of thing, interspersed with stuff like "Great minds think alike PC!" to legitimise his position and associations.

Don't say u weren't warned homey-g.
Labor need to control the pricing in order to ensure that the services will be affordable to their supporters.

Giving one company a monopoly over the investment in infrastructure is a sure way to make sure they can not.
Oh dear...seems a difficult choice as to whom to hand the "Mangey Maggot Award For The Week" to...but there we are.

Had not realised he was American, I must confess...in view of his name I just assumed he was..ummmm...'foreign' (if you know what I mean?)

Still he is to be applauded for his stand againt the Labor Government....he is alone in doing so.
Elijah, as a gay man you'd think you'd be more understanding than most about why it's stupid to discriminate against a group based on illogical grounds.

He's a bit 'foreign'? So being born in a different country to yours is some kind of deficit? Why?

How refreshing it is to see a company with some real cojones!
Kiwicrog...actually, no, I do not "understand".

I am not a 'victim', do not have the 'professional victim' mentality and have never been discriminated against.

Some of us have high levels of self confidence where that sort of thing never happens :P
Ah, yes. Telstra. They'll play hardball and see what they can negotiate. They know that in the end Rudd'll get his way, but Telstra will get as much out of the deal as they can.

LGM
Don't you get it, Elijah?"as a gay man"....that's supposed to determine your view of politics, economics, the universe and everything.Didn't you get the memo?
Kg,

Don't be thick.

My point being that gay people often get idiots with similar mindsets to Elijah judging them for something that has no relevance to the quality of their character. It doesn't take a "victim mindset" to get beaten up for being gay...

So I suppose I thought that being part of an oft persecuted minority would make someone less likely to be an idiot racist.

But sure, believe what you want, I think I can pick everything someone should think based on one fact about them.,.. Oh and Elijah is expressing sensible political views about the inferiority of those damn browinies.
Determining who can buy an election
There's an on-line petition requesting that the Governor General refuse assent to the Electoral Finance Bill on the grounds that it will make New Zealand a democracy in name only. Here's the link:http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-nz-democracy.html
An excellent analogy.
And an excellent job of putting the VC thefts into perspective. Though I'd still happily castrate the bastards that stole them with a spoon...
Appalling grammar that!

Allow me to rephrase:

"Though I'd still happily take a spoon and castrate the bastards who stole them."
Robert, I spy another error in your sentance: you omit the word "rusty". I'm sure you mean to perform the task with a RUSTY spoon.
RESERVE BANK: Cry havoc, and let slip the printing presses of doom
Even if you start from Bollard's premises, his worries about tax cuts seem odd. If the government has the money, it either saves it or spends it. If it spends the money, it tends to hire people. Hiring people also requires buying office space to put them in. What have been the two big components of inflation? Wages and non-traded goods (housing/buildings). When government spends money, it spends it in the areas most likely to push prices up.

If it provides a tax cut, people either save the money or spend it. If individuals spend money, a fair bit of that goes to buying imported goods which have zero inflationary effect. Price inflation in the tradeables sector has been pretty much zilch for the last year: we're a small player in the grand scheme of things, and our importing more stuff has no effect on prices.

I just don't see tax cuts winding up being highly inflationary.

Check the latest money supply stats. M1 has been dropping since June; M2 has been low since June. M3's growth rate is way down on last year.http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/statistics/monfin/c1/data.html gives M1 and M2.
Thanks for that Eric.

** It looks to me that if the government gives us back some of our money, it simply changes who has control of it, so as you say even starting from Bollard's premises there seems to be no reason to expect tax cuts to be inflationary, especially since government spending is in n the areas most likely to push prices up.

PS: Hope you're okay with me using your comment on the front page?

** It's hard for a neophyte like myself to extract competent meaning out of all the Reserve Bank figures, but in the absence of what Frank Shostak and other Misesians call the 'Austrian Money Supply' figure (AMS), it looks like the figure for growth in 'M3 excluding repurchase agreements' is the most relevant, although it specifically excludes central government deposits. [Shostak defines the figure for AMS as: "Cash+demand deposits with commercial banks and thrift institutions + governmentdeposits with banks and the central bank."

This definition, he says, "shows clearly that any expansion in money supply results solely from central bank injections of cash and commercial banks’ fractionalreserve banking."]

As you say, the M3(R) figure is now down to 7.9% (from a high of 16.7% this time last year, and 13.7% in May). At least it's heading in the right direction.

"The problem being created is that a very sizable proportion of New Zealand’s goods are being made in Asian countries (who are essentially exporting deflation) which means the CPI says 2.7% etc but the currency is debasing itself at 12-15% p.a. So people are asking for lets say 4% pay increases thinking that they are receiving a 1% real wage return but then try saving for a house but can not understand why they are inflating 15% p.a. or that their power bill, thanks to non-renewable resources, keeps going up. Simply the cost of borrowing goes up in an inflation targeting arrangement but there is not necessarily any monetary tightening and if official price statistics are stacked with consumerist high tech gadgets, the scam can go on for a while."
Important point:- the action the Reserve Bank undertakes when it introduces money into the economy IS inflation.

The rising prices that subsequently occur are a RESULT of the inflation undertaken by the Reserve Bank.

This nonsense of setting up a central bank to set interest rates and tell fairy tales about inflation and the economy is yet another example of a failure of socialism. Von Mies pointed this out in the '20s and '30s.

It is impossible for the socialist planner/commissar/bureaucrat to calculate value. "Socialism can't calculate." Given that the government schemes fail everywhere else (health, education, housing, crime, justice, etc. etc. etc.), why would anyone think that such a scam would be successful in diving the correct interest rate while simultaneously stealing wealth and decimating savings? Why indeed?

It was explained to me by an interesting dinner companion last year. He explained that, as with collectivists everywhere, socialists necessarily must lie.

A pox on them.

LGM
IPCC in Bali: Garbage Out, Garbage In
The thing that gets me about all this, is not a single delegate has called for an end to government subsidies for pollution.

i.e. French and American agricultural subsidies ...

I wonder why?
it truly is tragic though that the use of the words hypocrite and hypocrisy are forbidden in the House of Parliament. Maybe because they could be used too often?
A shame that the Bali bombers din't blow up this mob instead of the innocent holiday makers they actually targetted.
Hayden Planetarium - James Polshek
Except that the planetarium shown is the new one, not the one opened in 1935. The original was designed by Trowbridge & Livingston (not the one in the photos).

T. Lesser, former Senior Lecturer at the (old) Hayden Planetarium
My apologies, sir, and thanks for the correction.

It's amazing how quickly the new planetarium has become so 'iconic' an image.
Roger Douglas, 70 not out
http://www.guampdn.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071203/OPINION02/712030313/1014/NEWS17

This was in Mondays paper here on Guam.
That's the point, in the heads of most there is probably a grudging acceptance that something needed to be done in the 80s, but most will pick one reform they liked/didn't affect them negatively, but then spout on about what they hated (usually privatisation), all ignoring that the state's role in health and education grew and became more intrusive.

The ease by which the public re-elects a Labour government that has renationalised several industries (Air NZ, rail, electricity retail, ACC competitors) speaks volumes
What's wrong with "big money"?
One wonders if the theory that the rich can buy opinions and swing voters is true why the vehicle of the Business Roundtable - ACT - has never been a partner in government.

The disconnect with reality is nonsensical, but few will grasp the moral argument. There is an enormous overlay of envy and hatred for others being wealthy. It is seen to be through luck or through cheating. The phrase "you're lucky you can afford..." is the evidence of it
I remember a guy at university who spoke up during a commerce tutorial about this. When the envy of wealth raised its head, he said, "None of us want to be poor. We all want great success and wealth. That's why we are here today." Then he said, "Let's face it. Poor people are pathetic. There is not much good in poverty and those who are poor are poor for a reason. Whatever it is, it's a self-made reason." There was a silence and a few young women started bleating. He answered that his intention was to become wealthy and enjoy life. He didn't consider anyone should stop him and he didn't consider anyone's opinion or feelings worth more than his own. He pointed out that the women were only there to fetch wealthy husbands- something that later tuned out to be a sound observation. I since heard that Jay is in Europe where he is living a hedonistic lifestyle. Interestingly he was jealous of no-one, but how many are jealous of him!

LGM...that the women were only there to fetch wealthy husbands- something that later tuned out to be a sound observation.

That's true for Auckland Celebrity , Socialite & millionaire Gilda Kirkpatrick. I know that Ruth is jealous of Gilda's celebrity status, because Ruth has inquired in the blogosphere of who Gilda is? Gilda is hot.
Maryan Street: Making housing unaffordability worse
Maryan Street was on National Radio this morning explaining how she thinks this measure will reduce land prices. I'd have failed a second year econ student giving her explanation. Absolutely nonsensical.

Stringham was a classmate of mine at George Mason...good to see his housing study being picked up...
It was hearing her 'explanation' that fired me up to write the post. She's either dumber than a thicket of potted plants, or she's 'just following orders.'

This new law will get the problem out of the headlines until election day by allowing the dumbarse pricks to say they've "done something."

Meanwhile it will be biting everyone else on the arse.
It is exactly what Kiwis need and deserve. Meanwhile for those already owning property, this will increase the returns and increase the cap values. Ironic that a socialist govt is doing this. Perhaps they're aspiring slumlords themselves!

Mel
I heard Maryan on National Radio. You could almost hear the fear in her answer. I would guess that she is familiar the law of unintended consequences. I would guess that she can see it rearing its head in this arena, but she has recived the hospital pass and must run with the ball.It's something for the building industry, developers and housing charities to raise in election year. Oh wait, they will only be able to spend up to $120k...

I foresee developers landbanking, awaiting a change of government...
Meddling socialists sure know how to turn the motor of production off. Why would one bother being in the business if your production is dictated by an unproductive busy body?

Flashgordon is right, landbanking would be likely, until developers are regulated into production, or have their land nationalised.
or you just go ahead with your development and the very very last thing you build are the so called affordable homes, so as to not reduce the value of the development. Then when you come to build it, all the surrounding properties will have lifted their value and the value of the affordable home, so it is no longer affordable.

Insider
Christmas message
LOL, I like that.
Cue Card Libertarianism: Political Spectrum
I have come across a fascinating Canadian web site http://www.politicalcompass.org/nz2011 which also provides a very credible, certainly constructive political self-analysis online questionnaire. It positions political outlook in the political space the various political parties occupy and seems to be able to identify Libertarian tendency quite acurately.
'Gobhai Mountain Lodge' - Nari Gandhi
Great, I go to the doctor, I see houses like that in Home and Garden. I walk home I see infill housing and garage on lawn.
That's a beautiful house. It has an eary resemblance to some of Frank Lloyd Wright, in particular the floor plan. Those triangular geometries in the plan can be found in a lot FLW's built work.

There's something about that stone and that broad roof that makes the house appealing.
EFB debate at 'The Standard'
Let me get this straight, PC. For the last week, the Standard have been claiming that the National Party stole somebody else's intellectual property.

Is it true that you own the intellectual property to the picture of Perigo on your blog, which the Standard used and attributed to the EFB march, when in fact it was at the anti-smacking march, and didn't acknowledge you as the source for the photo?
Hmm, I confess I hadn't noticed that particular irony, but I don't think it's anywhere near the most important fish to fry here. More of a distraction from the main course, I would think.
Just for the record, this is the post from which the pic was pilfered.
Owned them, Peter. Well done.
Well done Peter, although I think you are plowing the sea.

The mob that runs the Standard (Tane & co.) will continue unabated their campaign of lies and deception. Thank God they reach a limited audience, otherwise NZ could become and ochlocracy.
well done Peter, I've been watching this site with a bemused detachment for some time.(strange creatures lurk there..)
I noted that roger nome made some comments on that blog. He has been hangin around DPF and other blogs but I've never seen him here at Not PC. There is only one conclusion and that is, the fucker doesn't want to come here, as LGM or PC would exposed his intellectual inferiority & mauled him around even in his own field of economics (that's what he has claimed in blogosphere).
Hey Manolo, are you still a racist?

Twice now around the blogs you've made remarks about me eating a bucket of KFC because I'm Maori. Recently when I said I was working late you joked it must have been a hui with kai provided. Yet other times you've made references to WINZ.

I wonder what your fellow libertarian mates think of racist remarks like that.

Oh, and you never answered my question the other day - are you from Wadestown? Cos I think I know you bro.
I'd rather be a racist than a socialist, personally. At least racists mind their own business. All socialists do is mind mine. Nobody has a right not to be offended, so give up on your race-baiting Tane and piss off back up Helen's arse.
I am with Tane here. There had been some racist comments about me, at DPF (twice - one last year and one earlier this year) and one at the business blog of Fronde CEO , Jim Donovan. It wasn't Jim who made the comment, but it was one of the regular readers of his blog. People who lost the argument do revert to attacking the person, but not the message.
Some people resort to racist slurs in arguments.Others use the racism label to stifle debate.I always regarded this blog as being better than that and mostly, it has been.
"Typical, just typical."- John Cleese

Kick it off with a distraction and then half way down the page and the racist card is played as these things generally do when the missed-it-bird flies across the sky and all of a sudden someone gets slapped across the face with a wet fish.

Scary thing is that you can slap some people with a fresh trout and they can never figure out why their cheeks are flushed, stinging and exude the pungently aromatic smell of a prawn cocktail.

Totally owned Peter.Bravo.
Yes racism is far from helpful, and anti-intellectual, but then so is bigotry against people who have successful businesses, or own more property than others, or think that adults should bear the consequences of their actions.

Those on the left eagerly throw around statements that are little more than blind bigotry about "foreign" investors, which is a form of racism, or treating anyone in business for profit as being akin to thieves, slave owners or murderers. In its extreme, this bigotry has created rivers of blood - as it did in the USSR, China and Cambodia on a grand scale.

However it distracts from the key point. Attacking someone on irrelevant grounds demeans one's own argument, but people can be attacked for wilful blindness and stupidity.
After Tane's usual faux outrage I guess your contribution to the Sub-Standard is going nowhere, PC. What do libertarians think of people who don't take any responsibility for the consequences of their own actions - such as going flame-trolling on other people's blogs, then playing the outraged victim when you get exactly what you're looking for?

I don't really want to stink up PC's blog with the dishonest, bigoted abuse that seems to be Tane's standard MO, but its obvious to me that a morals lecture from the Sub-Standard crew is like parenting tips from Britney Spears.
Tane, you're wrong. I'm not a racist, but a firm believer in the right to liberty and pursuit of happiness regardless of skin colour. Take your bogus outrage somewhere else.

It appears you are very capable of dishing it out freely to others, but very touchy and delicate when comes to being on the receiving end.

Is this another personality trait you share with Mallard?
Phew, that was a long thread. And I have to say, the debate goes to Insolent Prick and PC.

I read your comment at the Standard thread and it is very reasonable, quite a contrast from the usual slant coming from the anti-EFB protest. The 'extreme' in 'extremely important' has been taken out and given hyperbole that has turned many off the anti-EFB protest. If Boscawen's placard wavers had held messages more akin to the contents of your comment, then there might have been more support.

On the subject of ironies, Boscawen's protest was money driven. I suspect a good viral blog/email campaign for a good cause could produce an equally large protest turnout for nil cost. Essentially Boscawen's protest demonstrates that money does not buy votes just as the EB mailout did not buy votes in 2005. Both were a total waste of money launched by people who mistakenly thought that full page ads and automated phone calls would make a difference. Good democracy is driven by something less material: it is driven by good ideas, and some visceral motivation which are distributed freely by word of mouth, news reports etc. There was none of that in either campaign.

The indignation of moneyed groups such as SST against the $120,000 spending cap, while justified, is a little pointless given that election results ultimately come down to a combination of the overall basic summation of each party's policies how the leading players behave in the final run up to the election, in TV debates and from news reports etc which are all 'free'.
Presidential debates enmired in middle ground
Maybe Deborah would be more impressed if Libz took a leaf out of her book and held its 'meetings' in the grounds of Parliament in the dead of night...

Can anyone remind me what Deborah achieved in Parliament? Other than err 'strengthening personal relations' with the Business Round Table.

So much for the compromising your principles in order to get things done.
Deborah in parliament... wasn't that after whe had a mole cut out of her hide?

She was just wrong. Just as well the Libz let her go.

RatZ
No welcome
It is beyond a joke the extent to how badly the courts are bogged down.

He should have faced the music by now and already be residing where the jury see's fit.
Infinity pools
These things should be subject to a license - in the wrong hands they are an visual menace. ROAR
Capital Coast: Not just a die-while-you-wait health system
"...discourage clinicians" being open in remedying future problems." So, according to this bureautoad the problems are down to the clinicians.Bullshit.What a slimy way to weasel out of taking responsibility.
According to Newstalk ZB yesterday afternoon, public health spending has increased by 50% since 2000.

So much for the usual bleat of 'underfunding'. They're running out of excuses. No wonder the clinicians are now in the firing line ...

Definition of insanity again, anyone?
Actually this system operates exactly as it should. It is democratic. It is egalitarian. It is 100% succeeding brilliantly at giving a lot of commissars, administrators, gauleiters, bureaucrats and associated petty vermin something to do & somewhere to be. It grows and grows. Like a malignant tumour it kills patients, but that is its nature. that's what it does.

Of course the solution is to privatise all of the so-called health system. The trouble with that approach is that while it'd solve the problems for the patients, it'd be a disaster for the administrators, civil servants and associated administrators. Also the people of NZ would NEVER voluntarily vote for such a thing. They want exactly what they have got, even if they do moan about it a little.

As Menken said, "Democracy is when the people get what they want- good and hard."

Suckers!

LGM
That Commonwealth Report is quite a compliment to our health system. Did you read the bit at the start where is says that the US spends twice what other countries spend yet people in the US are more likely to report medical errors, forgo care due to costs involved, and say that the healthcare system needs to be rebuilt completely?

Quick: nationalise the supermarkets! We can all queue up for our rationed food just like we wait - and wait - and wait - for our rationed healthcare.

Care? Fair?? Guess you'd say it is if you're the damn bureaucrat with the clipboard.
I've never posted on a blog before, but I can't believe what Jordan wrote:

"Public Healthcare trumps Private", citing the USA as an example.

US healthcare is nothing like private: there are some private aspects as there are here, but the Govt spends $6000/person/year on healhcare. If it was private, this would be zero.

More important is the morality of public and private healthcare. Public healthcare comes from money taken by force or the threat of force - that is wrong.
Sus

Yup and how about this; the gauleiter who just resigned after 8 years in charge was on more than NZ$400,000 salary. Goodness knows what the perks and bosuses were on top of that. That's how a public health system realy operates! Exactly as it's supposed to do. Jordan better not get seriously sick any time soon.

LGM

BTW, was it 23 "accidental" deaths in one year? Well, all the civil servant needs to consider is this calculation:-

$400,000 > 23

Simple!
lgm, hope you don't mind, I put part of your comment up over at my place, under a post on the same subject.
KG

You are welcome.

BTW where is your site? What is the link so I can find it?

LGM
Thanks lgm.It's http://crusader-rabbit.blogspot.com
Husain: "Moderate muslims" must "end the madness"?
I'm not a theologian and have no great knowledge of islam, but it seems to me that the complete sacrifice of the essentials of humanity to a dogmatic belief that anything is justifiable if the name of god is invoked, is a key differentiator of Islam to post reformation Christianity.

I do wonder whether they have the significant and fundamental theological debates that still goes on within Christianity and whether they can do so without a fear of death and violencebeing present if they say the 'wrong' thing.

Insider
Ataturk went a small part of the way.
INSIDER: The irony is that their respective believers insist that both the Bible and the Koran are the work of their God, and if their books are to have any meaning they must maintain that belief.

Yet in order for them to be truly "religions of peace" the more barbaric parts of these books have to be rejected.

But in order for them to be recognised as being barbaric, a different source of morality than The Book has to be identified, something that Islam explicitly rejects.

Christianity, for example, only allowed the West out of the theological stranglehold of our own historical Dark Ages once Christians started dismissing the more barbaric parts of 'God's word.'

Which means that even Christians joined in rejecting God's word (or at least part of it) as barbaric drek. Thank goodness. But what does that say about the nature of "God's word," and the need to take it seriously? As Richard Dawkins points out, "…we do not as matter of fact derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not."
If the West had any values at all, it would firmly back hand Islamic dogma completely.
Ludeken's House - Jack Hillmer
Great photographs of some of the best modern house architecture anyone has produced. Darrell Caraway Architect
Renovators always make me shudder, regardless of the architectural style. Beautiful documentation of a most excellent and fair home.
Giz a job
Dear 25 yearz old;Thank you for your application but we feel that you may be somewhat over-qualified for the advertised position.However, should you be unfortunate enough to acquire a frontal lobotomy sometime in the near future we would encourage you to apply for the forthcoming vacancy of Minister for Finance.Sincerely, Annette King. (Minister for whatever remains to be screwed up)
Something in the wind on the Electoral Finance Bill?
Oh this would be the ultimate in betrayal and would greatly backfire on the National Party.

The only chaps to benefit would be ACT who could legitimately claim to be the 'Opposition' party.
This is an outrage.Obviously, what they're doing is ramming this pig through and betting the people will have forgotten all about it in 11 months.And they're probably right.
I hope that National will have enough spine to bind themselves to the CIR on the Anti-Smacking Law.

I certainly hope and trust that they will not let us down on the EFB as they did on S59.

I mean, whatever happened to the word called

Principle...???
"principle"? Is that related to "integrity"?We're talking politicians here, Andy.
oh. of course, good point! Listening to Parliament now.

http://www.radionz.co.nz/__data/assets/audio_item/0011/340598/nzparliament.asx
I simply cannot believe National would change their mind on a bill that would a) increase Labour's chance of re-election and b) give Labour a fourth term legitimacy it would have never had without cross-party support for the EFB.

It is unthinkable that National would do that.
Hi Matt, no, unfortunately it is not unthinkable, as others have pointed out, it wouldn't necessarily be in National's best interest to kick out the new EF law once they do get into power in 08.

We've already seen Key "the politician", he's one for the compromise, just to achieve what he wants.
If National did this again, then they are the bigger fools, and their leader would become known as "John Quisling".
Don't save rail
The sad thing is, I think some of it IS viable, but the weight of keeping vast sections of the network going to stroke political egos doesn't help. If the investment and effort was put into the 3 or 4 lines that are worth it, then it could sustain itself.

Might help if the highways were privatised too, but it is only likely to make a small difference.
What assumptions do you make about the price of oil?
The same made by people who have or have thought about pouring millions of dollars of their own money into it - rail's fuel efficiency is not universal and is insufficient to justify investing in duplicate bespoke infrastructure in many cases.
I worked on rail projects overseas. For the most part passenger rail is impossibly expensive and can't survive in the absence of massive subsidy and restrictions imposed upon alternative transport modes. Nevertheless it is a hugely lucrative business to be in if you are an infrastructure provider or, in some cases, the operator. If you are in the correct position you can bilch billions of dolars of taxpayer money out of self-indulgent fools who want to build monuments and train-sets for themselves.

Rail has utility in moving certain low-value bulk ores and similar cargo- usually non-time sensitive. Its usefulness declines as soon as it needs to operate with several intermodals and intermediate stops. Rail can sometimes be useful in super-highly population dense areas where for historic or geographic reasons other transport modes are restricted or do not exist (there are only two non-sibsidied passenger railroads I am aware of that are profitable, the rest are dogs).

Face it. This is essentially a 200 years old technology with all the drawbacks that entails. It is hugely expensive and not economic for most present applications. There are better, individualised, personalised alternatives which are far superior. Ever heard of the car, the truck, the motorcycle.....?

LGM"Nevertheless it is a hugely lucrative business to be in if you are an infrastructure provider or, in some cases, the operator."

Exactly. The real business of rail is not transport, it's farming subsidies.
PC

Yes, you are correct. It's a rort.

It's the same with pretty much all public transport everywhere. Rorts; big, bigger and biggest. Buses and busways are another example of a scheme to bilch funds. These scams all rely on the idiotic nature of bureaucrats and elected officials. It can't be over-stated how lucrative they are for the providers/operators and also consultants.

LGM
The free and frank view of TranzRail before Labour started meddling was that there are basically 5 freight lines worth keeping for now. Auckland-Wellington, Hamilton-Tauranga-Kawerau-Murupara, Oringi-Palmerston North-Stratford, Picton-Lyttelton-Dunedin-Invercargill and Canterbury-West Coast coal mines. Of them, maybe half may be worth it in the long term.

Frankly anyone living near most of the other lines is probably in "spot the train" mode for freight.
World chucking record
I have no idea whether he throws or not, but what you said is not correct.

It is a throw if he straightens the arm immediately prior to delivering the ball. If the arm stays bent or straightens after the ball has left the hand then it's not a throw.

The photos you posted just don't prove anything either way.
Law 24.3 states: "A ball is fairly delivered . . . if, once the bowler's arm has reached the level of the shoulder in the delivery swing, the elbow joint is not straightened partially or completely from that point until the ball has left the hand."
You can deliver with a bent arm, but can't straighten the elbow in the delivery action once the arm is over the height of the shoulder.

Murali has a deformity (since birth) which prevents his arm straigtening. And he has an amazingly double-jointed wrist which provides the massive spin.

The bio-mechanics experts have cleared him - twice. Only two Australian umpires have called him for chucking - and everyone knows Aussie Umpires are either cheats or child molesters.
You are wrong Peter. As long as the arm doesn't straighten, his action is legal.

And Murali has proven that he can bowl without straightening his arm:

"Murali took his test in England. Convinced of the legitimacy of his action but aware that it looked dubious to the naked eye, he said he was willing to undertake any relevant and objective experiment that might help to prove he bowled within the laws of the game. Specifically, he was prepared to put his elbow in a brace so that it could not straighten unduly at delivery. He knew it was not enough to satisfy scientists behind closed doors. He realised he needed to convince punters in the stands and the game, in whose record books his name took a prominent position.

Rest of the article here:http://www.smh.com.au/news/cricket/armed-and-dangerous/2007/10/25/1192941243724.html

Now if you were to argue that a disproportionate number of his wickets came against weak batting sides like Zimbabawe and Bangladesh that would be another matter.

But that ain't his fault. That's the fault of the administrators of the game.

Robert Winefield
That's interesting. He has what some would call a deformity or handicap, yet it lends him a tremendous advantage.

Some years ago there was a pilot whose lack of legs was thought to give him an advatage in high-G flight regimes. There are many other examples of handicaps providing some advantages. It seems that variety and differences are to be encouraged instead of stamped away and exterminated by regulation!

LGM
What makes Muli a great bowler is the mesmerising control he has and variety he gets from wrist and fingers. These are not diminished by the debate around the elbow but unfortunately are often forgotten.

It was the same attributes that made Warne the great great bowler he was. Still think he retired to early.

Insider
Murali is advantaged by a deformatiy that allows him to blow as others can't.As a leg spinner myself and probably the best NZ's ever produced (no lie,I am that good) I can vouch for the fact he is not "chucking" the ball....wheather its a bowl is another matter....but I think not....its a matter of fact and fact aligning.

I still think Warne is the "legit " item...
That should be "fate and fact" aligning...
James

“As a leg spinner myself and probably the best NZ's ever produced (no lie,I am that good)…”

I’m not sure if that is any sort of qualification at all given the “quality” of leg spinners we produce. You can’t seriously be claiming greaterness than Aucklan icon Brook “the ghost who” Walker? Unless you are the ghost of Clarrie….

Insider
Educate yourself on the matter. It's a shame you fall prey to conspiracy theories when you look beyond the fact that your own countrymen (Western Australian Bio Mechanic experts)cleared him.

http://www.islandcricket.lk/videos/murali-bowling-arm-brace
Don't send stupidity to college
Minto would not have been good enough to be a panel beater. That is a trade that requires skill, application and work to be any good at it. He'd not make the cut.

LGM
Minto would have been good enough to be a homeopaths. You don't need skills to enroll for homeopathy courses.
I cut this part from the PR, but sadly, Auckland University will be undermining the new standards by expanding positive discrimination:

Professor Dalziel rejected the suggestion the proposal could risk a slide to elitism.

She said special entry schemes currently ran in courses with restricted entry and it was envisaged similar arrangements would be used.

"We have very clear statements about equity groups and the ability of students with potential to come into the university."

Existing schemes include the "Maori & Pacific Island Admission Scheme" and the "Rural Origin Medical Preferential Entry" in the medical school, and quotas for Maori, Pacific Island and disabled students in the law school.
If I were in the Business school at Auckland, I'd be worried. What part of the University wasn't listed among the segments subject to entrance standards? Business. What happens to somebody rejected entry to Arts, Education, Science, Theology or Law? Well, either go to AUT, or flip over to Business.

Serious students thinking about economics or commerce perhaps should think about moving south. Perhaps to Canterbury. What proportion of the first year Business classes at Auckland are going to be the dregs rejected by the rest of the University?
I am all for 'elitist' Universities.

It is a disgrace we allow working class people with bad genes, bad skin and general stupidity into Universities.

There are plenty of factories for these chaps to work in, whilst Universities and 'Professions' should be reserved for those most able to 'appreciate' them.
Elijah, with views like the above, I can't work out whether you are actually the sophisticated fabrication of a 'Lefty', like some sort of elaborate joke at the expense of libertarians, or a real person expressing their opinion.

I sincerely hope for the former.

DenMT
Denm T

Of course I am a 'real' person expressing his views! gosh..how silly.

I have long felt University intake should be cut by 90% (at least) and we have paid a high price for allowing certain types of people into these institutions.
Lefties 'sophisticated', eh Den?!

Interesting adjective.
Dalziel is a professor of what exactly? Hell, my local supermarket checkout operator sounds more sensible than this woman. And probably is.
Sus - far be it from me to suggest that lefties might be capable of cultural sophistication! I certainly wasn't trying to perpetrate that kind of preposterous palaver.

The nub of my gist was that should Elijah in fact be the puppet caricature of a devious lefty, bent on discrediting libertarians by association with the sort of extraordinarily bizarre fringe views he is disseminating, that the effort was 'sophisticated': meaning in this case, highly complicated.

Why anyone would bother is beyond me, so I'm left with the troubling possibility that he is a real dude who isn't kidding when he suggests that the working classes possessed of 'bad skin' and 'bad genes' should be denied university entry.

I'm not laughing, and i hope no-one else is.

DenMTHere she is, looking exactly as you'd predict from her statements, and with a career just as dripping wet to match.

From her CV:"Professor Dalziel is a historian with particular expertise on nineteenth-century New Zealand and British history, political, social and wimmin’s history. She ... is currently researching a book that will examine the ways in which wimmin in Auckland negotiated their entry into politics and public life prior to wimmin's suffrage, their engagement in local suffrage politics, their relationship to the state and their role as citizens in the post-suffrage period. Blah, blah, blah."

Sounds like she's really swimming against the trends, doesn't she.
Was that a paid ad, Eric. Shall I send you an invoice before agreeing with you? :^)

What you describe is somewhat how Massey in Palmy used to work, but in reverse, with so many of the courses there full of people who failed to get into Vet School. But at least they were somewhat diluted by those who had chosen to be there.
I saw an article about a man who runs a $60m ship building company. He couldn't manage a University level engineering course so he gave up after one year and went to polytech instead.

Success at university gives some people a supreme arrogance.
@With people like this professor, determined to dumb down the educational system, it is time to ask a question.

How did they get there in the first place? The answer is through a secondary school system where failure is unknown.

Now the various professional disciplines are being forced to take students based on the fact they are impeded, brown, or from out of town. Just peachy.

The reference below is an examination of why Finnish students do well compared to Israeli children [a race noted for being sharp and industrious]

Summarised, it says if you are taught by the dregs, you will turn out dregs.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3478376,00.html

I challenge the NCEA supporters; next time you are in need of life threatening surgery, need defending in court, want to fly somewhere or get a building engineered---then pick an NCEA fellow graduate to do it for you. Get someone to make the phone calls to the funeral home first though, you won't be doing it later
Thanks PC--about what I suspected.She'd make good garden fertilizer and that's about all.I just put up a post over at my place about feminazis meeting PoMo in the midwifery trade--she'd fit right in.
Of course, the most delicious irony of all is the people I hear sniffing the loudest about 'elitism' are white collar professionals where you don't get a gold star for effort. You perform and achieve or fuck off.

When standards-based elitism is putting organic wholemeal on their designer tables, and Karen Walker blouses on their backs its not so bad, is it?
'bent on discrediting libertarians by association with the sort of extraordinarily bizarre fringe views he is disseminating, that the effort was 'sophisticated': meaning in this case, highly complicated.

Why anyone would bother is beyond me, '

Ask him how Jim Peron is. All will become clear.
November site stats
'Metro Shoes' Bungalow - Nira Gandhi
In the dock
"I just say that with something like this, I think everyone in public life – whether they are media personalities or a politician or whoever – we're all vulnerable to someone deciding they will try a private prosecution and I think that is an issue of some concern,"

Is this implying that she who must be obeyed, thinks that politicians should not be accountable in the courts?

Has Helen been watching how Mugabe and company are immune from their courts?
"The Duck in the Dock".

Sounds like a children's book.
RR, I put a comment about that over in No Minister.It sure sounds ominous.Hypothetical--if Clark refused to hold an election and declared herself El Presidente for life on NZ, exactly what could anybody do about it?
kg, knowing the average New-Zealander, not much.
Quote of the Day, from Rowan Atkinson
Hmmm. I'm sure I've seen that attributed to Thomas Sowell.
Loved that the photo on the linked story was Little Britain's Matt Lucas in character as 'the only gay in the village'. Certainly needs to be in prison - not for 'hate speech', but for crimes against fashion and not actually being very funny.
If it is illegal to tell jokes about gay people, then shouldnt it be illegal to tell jokes about STRAIGHT people?

Which will make it illegal to tell jokes FULL STOP.

What happened to that once PROUD but now very SAD country

Whatever it was is happening here also
Soon, very soon, the camps will open again. Who knows, tommorrow you might be ready for the ovens!

Horst
Something I just noticed.

Atkinson here his talking about "Hate Speech", but it could just as easily apply to the vile Democracy Rationing legislation.

Some people find what the Exclusive Brethren did offensive. No problem with that, people can be offended with whatever they want. But to then ban citizens from communicating with each other for a third of their lives - Nein Danke.
"No one lives who insults the prophet."
Help Gillian (and dice with Death) .. get a cute teddy!

http://www.cafepress.com/mynameismo
Although the islamic law in Saudi Arabia is nothing short of disgusting, you have to admit that Gillians was stupid if she thought she could call a teddy bear Muhamadd, and get away with it.
...actually Mohammed is an extremely common first name for Moslem men so it would be an easy mistake to make.
AngloAmerican

Yes, it would seem so. And if it wasn't this mistake there is always the risk of making some other "error" and "insulting" the local religious.

I know several men called Mohammed. Some of them are religious. Those guys get really angry if you so much as doubt the religion, let alone criticise it. No jokes for believers.

I reckon if you'd been in the Sudan for a while you'd have to be aware that many of the local people are violent barbarians. You'd be living on a knife edge; a risky existence especially as an outsider. And for a white woman... well there are better and saner places she could choose to spend her time, surely? Oh well, lesson learned and at least she didn't get a good taste of 40 lashes to her bare hide- back, breasts and buttocks. At her age it'd be damn near a death sentance.

"No one lives who insults the prophet".

LGM
Anonymous, she didn't name the teddy bear. A boy in the class she was teaching did, because it was his name - the rest voted to agree. Her great crime was to let children do this.

State aid to Sudan should cease, given this, Darfur and its Islamism.
Just for the record - I'm a Lefty, and I say screw Islam (and the other religions).

Perhaps I should take my uni magazine writing on these subjects to my blog...
Nash not for Napier
Gagging justice
I think I can kinda get my head around why the law tries to pretend that a person's past actions (including criminal history) should not be a ble to prejudice a fair trial.... kinda..

But surely, nobody should be protected indefinitely from the public and jurors knowing what kind of peope they are if they are on trial for a crime?

I this case, the man obviously changed his name to attempt to hide his past actions. Well, this has come back to haunt him, and rightly so in my opinion.

I realise that this isn't (at least, yet,) the case here, but it seems that many criminals are found AFTER being found guilty to have perpetrated many similar crimes before. This is obviously stupid and it is a perversion of natural justice to hide the facts from juries and the public.

I would propose a 'three strikes' rule. If a person is on trial for a jailable offence, then it should be known by all if they have previously been convicted of more than two jailable offences.

And in this case, the public and the judicial system has a definite RIGHT to know what sort of man we are dealing with here. After all, in a jury trial, the prosecution still has to present the FACTS of the case... and it should all be done in an open and transparent manner.
Interesting this idea of controlling what information is available to public and juries (presumably so that they are tabula rasa). Most interesting that the argument is turned on its head with regard to insider trading and the so-called economic equilibrium models (you know, perfect information equally available to all participants and all that).

Funny how the powers that be are so compartmentalised in their thinking and action.

LGM
By their deeds you shall know them...unless they are airbrushed out of history.
I find this kind of thing far more worrying than the EFB.No justice, no hope of maintaining a civilised society.
CD launch
That's a REALLY old pic of terence. I'm sure he'll appreciate it

He certainly has been a great contributor to singing, especially in Dunedin but also via the Mobil/Lexus SOng Quest, for which he has been the 'official' accompanist for years.